Review of Avanti! (1972) by Edith N — 06 Nov 2010

Better With Some Serious Editing.

Not long ago, I stopped reading a book about comedy. Indeed, the only thing which prevented me from throwing it across the room in disgust was that it was a library book. It referred to [i]Desk Set[/i] as a "lesser" Tracy/Hepburn movie. One of its complaints was that they were "too old" to fall in love. Now, I have just looked it up, and he was fifty-seven at the time, she fifty. Though I wouldn't have known it by looking at either of them. Now, neither of the main characters in this movie were quite that old--Jack Lemmon was forty-eight and Juliet Mills not even thirty--but I have no doubt that same complaint has been raised in a whole bunch of places. Some people have this strange belief that there's an age at which you just stop falling in love. Now, I do believe that you fall in love differently at different ages. On the other hand, there's no such thing as "too old.".

Wendell Armbruster, Junior (Lemmon), has been sent to retrieve the body of his father, Senior, who died while on vacation at the Italian spa town of Ischia. Senior was the head of a huge conglomerate, and the employees of his factories and so forth, 250,000 of them, are to take time off on the following Tuesday to watch the funeral on closed-circuit television. There will be all sorts of bigwigs at the funeral. Only Armbruster has not calculated two factors. One is the curious slowness of Italian bureaucracy, which means that he should have made arrangements for the funeral after working out arrangements for getting the body out of the country. The other is that it turns out his father wasn't alone in that car accident. He was with an Englishwoman, whose daughter, Pamela Piggott (Mills), has come to retrieve her mother's body, though she thinks it would be best if their parents were buried side-by-side in Ischia instead.

Of course, the sequence of events leads to their falling in love themselves. The film, indeed, implies that Italy itself has conspired to make them do so. We have an over-long sequence of Pamela, admittedly much less straitlaced than Armbruster--to the extent that I think of her by her first name and him by his last--wandering about happily, experiencing a life she'd never known before. She's never been anywhere before, and to start here, in such a beautiful -place, is like a dream to her. The hotel manager, Carlo Carlucci (Clive Revill), is also actively encouraging of the pair, arranging for as much as possible to be as it was for the parents, who met there every year from July fifteenth to August fifteenth. The fact that Armbruster must wear Senior's clothes, even, having left Baltimore with only a briefcase--he even had to trade clothes with a guy on the plane so he doesn't show up wearing golf clothes, having been pulled off the course--and therefore not having clothes of his own.

But that sequence of Pamela on the town does run a bit long. And there's a bit too much naked Jack Lemmon. The side plot about Bruno the Valet (Gianfranco Barra) is vaugely amusing but also kind of unnecessary, as is all the to-do about the bodies and the Trotta family. There is more than enough going on when the pair are just getting to know one another. Armbruster's discovery of his father's infidelity is well-developed, as it should be, and I do like the feeling of inevitability to the whole thing. Even the twists and turns of Italian regulations and habits are funny. The idea that no one does anything on Sunday in a Catholic country is one which ought to have occurred to the Americans before it does, but the idea of a three-hour lunch so that nothing gets done from one to four is a little less obvious. Everything other than the bureaucracy and the love story should have been cut in the final edit.

As should all reference to Pamela's being fat. She weighs 133 pounds, she says at one point. Mills--nowhere near as famous as her sister, Hayley--is five foot two, so that seems a little heavier than she ought to be, but it looks proportionate on her. Even when we see her naked, she looks damned good. The word we are looking for here is "voluptuous." She doesn't seem to have any of the unpleasant bits of appearance in a woman weighing substantially more than she should. (I think she plans to lose twenty pounds, though it could be thirty.) She doesn't even have a potbelly. I'm wondering if the actress who originated the role on Broadway weighed more and the 133 was put in the script because it seemed to much for Mills to weigh. On TV Tropes, they have a page dedicated to "Hollywood Homely," the person in the movie whom you're told is plain but who is actually beautiful. I think they have one for "Hollywood Heavy," too, or they maybe categorize it under the same thing. Either way, there's a place on that page for Mills in this.